1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for recommending applications to users of in-vehicle infotainment systems, where the recommendations are derived from existing user/application rating data which are collected from infotainment system users, filtered and analyzed to produce both a user-driven consensus rating and an application-driven consensus rating for user/application relationships where no rating exists.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information/entertainment systems, or “infotainment systems”, have become very popular in vehicles, as the functionality and performance of electronic systems has skyrocketed, Internet access in vehicles has become widely available, and user capabilities and expectations have grown accordingly.
Infotainment systems in modern vehicles not only allow a driver or passenger to interact with a smart phone or mobile device, the systems also provide their own built-in infotainment functionality—including features like storing and playing media files, running native applications (“apps”), connecting to the Internet for file access and real-time data, etc.
As vehicle manufacturers roll out more built-in infotainment systems, developers have responded by making more apps available for the vehicle infotainment systems. For some brands of vehicle manufacturer infotainment systems, there are now thousands of apps available for download and execution. As the app space becomes more populated, it becomes more difficult for a driver or a passenger in a vehicle to find the apps that they may be most interested in. This is particularly true because a driver is concentrating on driving and not on browsing for apps.
Existing app usage trackers, on smart phones and the like, are limited to simple tracking of app usage for the purposes of conserving battery life or minimizing cellular data transfer. Likewise, existing app recommendation engines typically only evaluate simple parameters such as app category. Much more can be done to understand app usage trends and to assist vehicle drivers and passengers in finding and executing apps that are likely to be enjoyed by them personally and/or useful to them in the current context of the vehicle driving environment.